A Lie Of The Mind: A Play in Three Acts

Act II collects the characters in their respective homes, with Mike, Beth, Meg, and Baylor in Montana, while Lorraine, Sally, and Jake are in Southern California. However, Frankie immediately moves from his own family’s home to Beth’s. Mike rejects Frankie, and Baylor shoots him in the leg accidentally, showing that Frankie is not in the right place. By invading Beth’s family, Frankie has endangered himself and disrupted an already fragmented family. Critically, Frankie is shot with a deer rifle. Deer often represent innocence, and this symbolism fits with Frankie’s honorable intentions of resolving the conflict between the families. Much as Jake spends the first half of the play incapacitated following his violence against Beth, Frankie now spends the remainder of the play incapacitated following his attempt to correct Jake’s wrongdoing. This highlights the theme of The Collapse of the American Family. This framing of Jake and Frankie shows the major issue in A Lie of the Mind’s families, in which both hurting or helping in a situation leads to greater disarray.

Act II Scene 1 prompts an evaluation of the gendered roles of the characters in their own homes. Baylor orders Meg and Beth to do tasks around him, including taking off his gear, getting a stool, and making coffee. Baylor specifically delegates these tasks, removing himself from the action while maintaining a tone of authority. When Meg offers to take on Beth’s task, Baylor shouts: “Let Beth get it! You help me off with this gear now. I’ve never seen anybody get so easily distracted as you. Just keep yer mind on yer business now” (42). Baylor treats Meg like she is a child, warning her against distractions and preventing her from participating in delegating tasks. Critically, Baylor calls helping him with his clothing “yer business,” implying that Meg’s job in the house is to tend to Baylor. This layers on the theme of The Role of Gender in Dysfunctional Relationships, in which Baylor is taking on a performance of patriarchal masculinity. He frames himself as a rational head of the family while Meg becomes an emotional, dependent person in their relationship. These framings rely on traditional Western gender roles, which limited women’s lives to tending to their household and children while allowing men the freedom of interacting with the outside world.

Beth, though disoriented, begins to understand how these gender roles influence her life and the lives of the other characters in Act II, Scene 3. She recognizes that masculinity and femininity are performances, much as she has experienced through acting. Beth takes Baylor’s shirt as a costume and tells Frankie that they can pretend to be different genders. Though Beth’s initial masculine performance is seemingly romantic, saying she and Frankie are in love and referring to Frankie as a beautiful woman, she quickly becomes sexually violent. Beth says: “You fight but all the time you want my smell. You want my shirt in your mouth. You dream of it. Always. You want me on your face” (58), all while pushing Frankie on the couch. 

Beth’s performance underscores the mixture of sexuality and violence she experiences with Jake. It exposes how the gender norms that appear to order their household are rooted in both social and sexual domination, which can only be enforced through violence.

A parallel between Jake and Beth is their separate suspicions that their families are plotting against them, which resonates with the theme of The Fragmentation of Memory and Identity. Jake believes Frankie and Lorraine are trying to make him suffer, while Beth believes Baylor and Mike told the doctors to remove her brain. Jake tells Sally: “Frankie thinks I deserve to suffer. So does Mom” (49), though the reason for Jake’s guilt is still unclear. Sally compares Jake to his father, which upsets him, but Sally’s comparison hints at a possible reason for Jake’s guilt. Their father abandoned the family, and Lorraine complains about Jake being away from home, while Frankie seems to always be getting Jake out of trouble. Jake’s guilt likely stems from how his own life is similar to his father’s life regarding the treatment of their family.

Beth’s conspiracy, however, is rooted in the same gendered issues she is exploring in her post-traumatic state. She claims Baylor and Mike had her brain cut out, saying: “They don’t say. Secret. Like my old Mom. Old. My Grand Mom. Old. They cut her out. Out. Disappeared […] My Father sent her someplace. Had her gone” (56). Earlier, Meg expressed confusion, failing to remember whether she or her mother was lobotomized, and now Beth repeats that confusion. From the fragments in these scenes, we understand that Meg’s mother struggled with some form of mental illness, which led Baylor to have her committed in a hospital where she was held against her will and lobotomized. 

Now, both Meg and Beth struggle with feeling like they, too, have been lobotomized, but these feelings are explicitly linked to masculinity. Beth does not suspect Meg of doing anything, instead focusing her paranoia on Mike and Baylor, who have control over her. The specific use of “brain” and “cut” in Beth’s discussion of her hospitalization evoke the violence of her experiences with men but also the conditioning of gender norms. From a young age, Beth has lived with Mike and Baylor, both men who demand obedience, which led her to a relationship with Jake, another violent, controlling man. Beth is struggling with her feelings for Jake, which are gradually being replaced with feelings for Frankie, a man she has identified as feminine.